How I Conquered My Ego
I remember my first real high-pressure finance job out of grad school. For the first time, I had overarching responsibility for driving the analytics forward in this company. If things failed — the buck stopped with me.
My anxiety was 100 times anything I had experienced up to that point. If you’ve had any job-related performance anxiety in your life, you’ll recognize some of the symptoms:
- Nights waking up at 3 am with a heart on overdrive
- Mini panic attacks opening email
- Sundays spent trying to push down the stress bubbling up for the incoming Monday
The Power of the Childlike Ego
The sheer size of our universe is daunting when you try and grasp it. Philosophers and scientists alike have spent hundreds of years trying to comprehend the scale — not even counting the contents. So what driving force pushes us to stress about our lives when our time and scale are so insignificant?
This is the power of the ego — that voice in your head that seems to be reassuring or fighting your thoughts and choices. After constant companionship from our unknown guest, we tend to see it as a part of ourselves over time. This comfort starts a long chain of events that often end in frazzled anxiety. The mistake is assuming the ego has our best interest at heart.
Both Nietzsche and the foundations of Buddhism are correct when they lament that the untamed ego is a major source of individual suffering. The ego most closely resembles a child in that way. Imagine an undisciplined child in public — they lack any behavioral control usually driven by a lack of structure. We see the child wreaking innocent havoc due to the fact they do not have healthy control of their impulses. You may be drawing some parallels to how your mind ruminates. They are not much different.
Due to their similarities, the solutions are similar as well. Both need discipline. How does one discipline their mind? Here are the strategies I find most successful.
Finding Perspective
By removing the power of the immature ego, lives become more peaceful. That explains why my glimpse into the skies always put me at ease. My insignificance put my selfish ego in its place. We must be diligent in doing this often and consistently.
So what’s left? By dropping self-importance in the face of insignificance, what remains?
You have freedom.
Anxiety strips that mental freedom through the egos prominent focus on meaning and permanence. Shifting your perspective on how you view these concepts can change your life. Those of us with anxiety try and build up meaning in our lives and fear anything that threatens our flimsy paper castle. That tight grip on how reality should be is a major driver of symptoms ranging from rumination to compulsive behavior. The solution is simply letting go.
Those were two of the main pillars of thought I had to crumble to finally address my anxiety.
My idea of meaning was tied to my work. Anxiety flared up when anything threatened my work and thus my meaning. Following Buddhist thought, I began to embrace that everything is as it as. By trying to append “meaning” or trying to “matter,” I was trying to uncover something I already had.
I also addressed my firm grasp on trying to keep everything as is. The true fear that drove my job-related anxiety above was that my wife and family wouldn’t value me without this job. So I held onto it with everything I had. During COVID, this is especially relevant. Life flows like a river and we are free to try and fight the current or flow downstream peacefully. The current cannot be fought and you end up downriver anyway.
The importance is not in fighting change but in embracing that all will be fine regardless of what change occurs. I lost my job from COVID. During my COVID job loss, I was not a man without work but a man with more time for his family. We took fewer vacations but spent more time together. We ate less fancy meals but spent more time eating together. The fear was not reality.
If we choose to flow with life, it seems natural to not pursue anything beyond what falls in our laps. I choose to view it differently. Without anxiety holding me back, I’m able to pursue a life that I want without fear of judgment or conforming to societal norms. And if that burning rocket into the stars comes crashing back to Earth? I can live without fear knowing that I can always try again.
Originally published at https://workingmanszen.com on September 25, 2020.
